The phrase national decline finally has entered the lexicon of American political thought – and not soon enough. How much time America has to address its national decline is an interesting question given that the nation’s government has entered a period of stagnation and ideological paralysis. The institutions of government, paralyzed by the nation’s increasingly polarized and monetized politics, show no signs of being able to put forth strategies to sustain the nation’s future.
Category Archives: Globalization
The Smallness of Not Knowing
It if was not enough to have to listen to Michael Wilbon gratuitously ping soccer for no good reason on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption – which I watch religiously – now comes CNN’s Rowland Martin not only to demean the world’s most popular sport but to advocate violence against gays. Wilbon is quite sane on the gay matter but civil rights pressure groups are after Martin’s head.
Small Steps in the Direction
Because HispanicLatinos already are a great part of the nation’s military and will be a larger part still in the years ahead, they should monitor President Obama’s recent decisions to assert American power in the South China Sea. From Australia to the Philippines to Thailand, the United States is creating pockets of American strength to make sure China’s growth as a world power does not retrace the erroneous path that Japan took more than 70 years ago. Left unchecked, a totalitarian Japan swept across the Pacific and only a bloody effort led by the United States pushed them back.
You have to be on top of things to know how cleverly China is going about its business as it senses that the balance of power not only in that region but in the world is moving away from the United States. Building gigantic commercial ports that also can accommodate the large naval vessels it is constructing at high speed is one of the easier examples. China is active on all fronts, from Iran to Latin America to outer space. No one begrudges them their advancement as a world power and their development as a new and important nation. But let us make sure that the Chinese rise to power is not predicated on thinking that the United States is going to go silently into the night. Continue reading
A Different Kind of Tea Party
My tea this morning is perfect. As Premier of China and head of government and the State Council, I seldom get a bad cup of tea. The intra-party struggles have been resolved. We seem to be managing that burst of inflation that reared its head in the economy. Our balance of payments continues to grow spectacularly in our favor. Things are fine. We need to open up credit a bit more, but generally we are on our way. Why do I feel so odd, then?
Seeing Growth in Ourselves
In the midst of the economic recession and the failure of the super committee to begin fixing the federal budget, it is not surprising that households and businesses across the nation harbor doubt and perhaps a defeatist attitude about the future.
But HispanicLatino households of all sizes – and business owners in particular – might do well to consider a contrarian approach, a strategy that nets returns by going against the current grain. Contrarian thinking requires perceiving the future differently.
Turning Back History
The long arc of the immigration story has gotten us here, literally. Yet on one hand, the demographic and economic forces which are structural in nature and in place have led to the assertion of immigration as a population change agent. Immigration, as it has always, is adding to the population of the country and changing it in the process.
On the other hand, the countervailing sentiment is also asserting itself, so that states like Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana and Texas are leading the equally natural anti-immigrant reaction.
All the World’s a Soccer Ball
The sight astounded my friend Tony. He had entered another world far, far different than anything he had experienced. I had warned him. He did not believe it when I told him what to expect. He had been to stately Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., before, but not for anything like this. In many ways that day for me in 1978 was when the modern era of globalization became real, although its forces were already underway.
Little did we know then that the arguments among the Chinese elites were underway on whether or how to bring China out of its communist shell into the real world. Only six years prior, Richard Nixon had astounded the world by travelling to Peking to set off the debate. Three decades later, the world has changed, so that Beijing ranks as important as Washington. Continue reading
Thinking Beyond the Recession
An unforgiving national unemployment rate of nine percent and stagnant – or declining – wages for the average household for the last ten years dominate the minds of Americans worried about the economy. As important is the number of business closings, though it seldom gets the same amount of ink. More than 1.5 million businesses have closed since the start of the current recession. A high unemployment rate and extenuated business closures feed off each other in an economy with little demand. Continue reading
And That’s the Way It Is
I tried to call the fellows at the Politico.com website in northern Virginia earlier this week. No, not about Herman Cain. I wanted to make sure that its Friday tip sheet for the Sunday morning news programs includes Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. The tip sheet gives a heads-up on whom the producers of the main networks have invited as guests, and Zakaria’s Global Public Square by far overshadows anything on the other networks.
This is no small matter, especially for HispanicLatinos who are a globalized population in a globalized world. Continue reading
The Unreality of Being Lola
Everything seems unreal. The economy is stuck with no prospect of renewal. We are still in Afghanistan and Iraq. Greece, its economy about the size as that of Massachusetts, could set off the next financial contagion. Millions of additional homes and properties are still underwater and face foreclosure. Next door in Mexico 40,000 people have lost their lives since 2006 as the drug cartels metastasize. And no one talks about America’s impending decline. Unreal.
Adding to the unreality was the Republican presidential debate Tuesday in Las Vegas. Vegas. The city in the desert that should not be. The most unreal of cities. A desperate city of desperate people.
The debate undid the German expression Einmal ist keinmal (once is never), the idea being that if something happens only once it did not happen at all, for how is anyone to know anything about it relative to something similar. And so the debate was just like the last one, another example of our collective race to the bottom.
The idea that Herman Cain is really in contention to be the nominee of a party dominated by white southerners is unreal. That Willard Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts signed a version of the Obama health care plan and now disowns it is unreal, but not as unreal as the Republican rank and file willing to forget that fact in their single-minded blood-thirst to beat the President. That Newt Gingrich – who abandoned his sick wife in the hospital – can talk about the need for the nation to come together as a community to provide heath care is unreal. And any race in which two Texans are running for office after the spectacular fiasco that was George W. Bush is beyond any reality.
That Michelle Bachman is on stage is equally surreal. When Harry S Truman became president, the pundits bemoaned his ascension, thinking him unfit, barely educated and corrupt. Yet Truman was real, and he had studied Latin and Greek and was not the illiterate, uneducated phony the press expected him to be. That the country countenances someone like Bachman as a candidate for president shows the depths of the unreality that has gripped the country – and the superficiality.
Who are these people?
That is the question the Republican electorate seems to be asking itself. One survey suggests that almost 70 percent of Republican voters remain undecided about the current lineup. I have to wonder how many will still be undecided after the nominee is chosen.
The GOP debate on Tuesday started at the same time as the telenovela on Telemundo that chronicles the life of the tragic Lola Volcán. Over-the-top soap operas on Univision and Telemundo are easy ways to re-enforce one’s Spanish. Dashing dudes and curvacious women do much to conjugate. Verbs, too. Thinking that the candidates’ show on CNN was more important and real than Lola’s latest travails, I started watching the debate. Lola was hands down more real. And so I escaped into that reality, at least for an hour, as she battles yet another demon in her life, an evil named Diana Mirabal.
If we could only stand up to the demons confronting the country as bravely and as resolutely as Lola does hers.
But our unreality, alas, is real.
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